by Lee Siegel
* * *
After that night, the unrest between Claire and me subsided. This didn’t mean that our relationship was deepening. Our relationship was coming to an end. The sometimes delicious tension of being lovers had snapped under the weight of my emotional needs. At night, we held on to each other in bed, where the sexless make-believe of being two nonhumans who had turned themselves into imaginary animals began to drive out, once and for all, the make-believe of Claire and Doug, which had always occurred right at the edge of sexlessness anyway.
Our relationship was waning not only because, thanks mostly to my vortex of need, we had fallen back into childish habits. There was a more practical reason that our relationship was doomed. Toward the end of my second year at Bradley, my mother called to tell me that my father had declared bankruptcy. He could not give her the money he was required to. As a result, she could no longer afford to pay for the room and board expenses that the student loans didn’t cover. Shifting to part-time status so that I could work my way through school was out of the question. You needed to be a full-time student to be eligible for financial aid and loans, and I would not have been able to earn enough money to cover all the school expenses myself. I had to leave Bradley and return to New Jersey.
I was torn about this sudden development. I prized what little independence and small share of fortitude I thought I had won for myself by studying in an environment so different from where I had come from, and so far away from home. I felt close to Simon and Eduardo, and to their families, especially, of course, the Caravanteses. I thought that I was in love with Claire. The chief symptom of our waning relationship was that cuddling, snuggling friendship, which produced the illusion of a deepening intimacy.
But I had grown estranged from Bradley. I hungered for a cosmopolitan atmosphere electric with ideas and intellectual ambition. When I daydreamed of such a place, I imagined being surrounded by the magic that books had implanted in me, by the Old Man’s reassuring detachment and long view of things, by the complicity I felt I had with the past that was embodied in books—I imagined all my secret resources being recognized and praised. I wasn’t just forced from Bradley. I wanted to leave, too.
* * *
One day a political science professor I admired, and whom I often visited during his office hours, abruptly asked me: What are you doing here? You should be at a place like the University of Chicago, he said. He himself had a graduate degree from there. The next holiday weekend, Simon, Eduardo, and I set out in Eduardo’s old Chrysler for Chicago. I stayed one night with Eduardo and his family, and one night with Simon and his. On Saturday the three of us drove to Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago was located.
Yet instead of inspiring me, the campus had the effect of stopping me in my tracks. A place this excellent and rare, I thought, would never allow me in.
Still, the university lodged itself in my imagination. My fantasy of the other workers at the medical book warehouse having been in prison, and my vision of what it would be like to be in prison, sprang from a feeling that had grown stronger in me: the feeling that I was imprisoned myself. The monumental limestone hardness of the University of Chicago’s walls were a revelation. They were the very opposite of prison walls. They were the anti–prison walls. They kept out the forces of unfreedom: money, competition, social judgments that were all about your fitness as a social animal rather than your fitness as a human being. I might have thought that I did not deserve to dwell inside the university’s sacred parameters—not yet, anyway. But the walls that made me despair of ever belonging there also inspired me with hope that I could be protected by them. Perhaps, like some humane Scandinavian country, or better yet, Switzerland in wartime—its insurmountable, custodial Alps ideally the birthright of every human being trapped in the combat of living!—I could someday find sanctuary at a university. At a great university, my fitness as a receptive, kind, creative human being—this was how I conceived of myself, for better and for worse—would finally be recognized, and my psoriatic, deluded yet irrepressible self taken under protection. I needed a university like the wonder in Hyde Park. I was sure that being a part of a community that was universally respected would have the effect of raising my own self-esteem.
* * *
Having escaped New Jersey for Bradley, I now had to escape Bradley. I loved calling Paul out of the blue, reversing the charges when his mother wasn’t home. His groaning, gasping laugh made me long to continue our friendship.
I was not about to leave Claire, though. I asked her to spend the summer with me in Paramus. I still needed her, and convinced myself that we were fated to be together and that, even if I did not return to Bradley, I could live in Peoria anyway, or she could transfer to a school in New Jersey. Claire herself, accustomed to accepting things when there was an appeal to her goodness as a person, agreed to come. The world was also a strange and dangerous place for us, and the fact that we knew each other so well was a source of strength that neither of us could do without.
Together we made the nineteen-hour journey by train to New York as soon as the semester ended. From Penn Station we walked to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, our suitcases rumbling behind us as we pulled them along the crowded sidewalks. At Port Authority, we changed to a bus headed for Paramus.
5
SHOWDOWN
Certain things that people said to me have stuck in my mind with the power of literature.
About twenty-five years later, in New York, after my divorce from my first wife, a much younger woman I was seeing told me a story. It was Thanksgiving night and we were on the phone. Her name was Charlotte. She had gone home to her mother’s house somewhere in suburban New Jersey. I had spent the night alone, preferring to buy a takeout dinner at a delicatessen earlier in the day, which I heated up that evening, than to sit, embarrassed about having nowhere to go, in a diner or a Chinese restaurant. She had given me her number, assuming that I wouldn’t call, and I took it, intending not to. In the end, I called her anyway. She was glad to have someone to relieve her boredom and to pull her away from her antagonism with her mother. I was grateful to have someone to talk to.
Her parents were divorced and she was out of touch with her father. Her mother had very little money. She lived in an affluent town in the well-appointed house the court had awarded her. Charlotte hated leaving her shared apartment in New York, where she was a graduate student at New York University, to return to her mother’s house for the holiday, but she had no choice. Her mother hectored her into coming back, and threatened to stop sending her the small but vital checks she put in the mail every month if she didn’t. For all that, once she arrived home, her mother, Charlotte complained, could not stop criticizing her. Infuriated by her mother, feeling trapped and infantilized, she spoke more and more rapidly, more and more half to herself and half to me, until her own voice and her critique of her mother calmed her down.
In the course of this conversation, Charlotte related to me the following story. Across the street from her mother’s house, where Charlotte had grown up, there lived a couple who had once worked together in the CIA. They were married for thirty years. They raised two children who, a few years earlier, had left home to go off to college. One day, shortly before Thanksgiving, the husband got up from the kitchen table where he and his wife had eaten breakfast together every morning. He walked over to his wife and punched her in the face. He kept punching her until her face was a bloody pulp. Then, without taking anything with him, he walked out of the house and disappeared. No one had seen or heard from him since then.
Out of nowhere, my mother erupted into another person. She developed another self the way a lobster will grow another claw to replace the one that has been bitten off. I could see that these weird modes of behavior were slowly becoming normal in her eyes. She tested them at first, cautiously, the way you run your tongue over and over the hole in your mouth left by a tooth that has just been pulled. Gradually the gaping chamber in your mouth becomes as familiar
as your other teeth.
Lola experimented with her new patterns of behavior as if still aware of how bizarre they were and trying to suppress them out of vanity or simply fear. But soon she surrendered herself to them.
* * *
My mother welcomed me back with her usual histrionics. She greeted Claire, whom she had never met before, with her customary “sweetie,” “honey,” and “darling,” as though receiving us in her dressing room after some show. But when Claire’s attention was directed elsewhere, Lola could not stop inspecting her with narrowed eyes. She made sure that I saw her as she did it.
Then, as Claire was speaking, my mother would catch my eye and mimic Claire as she talked, as if inviting me to join her, as I sometimes had done in other situations, in a show of contempt, though in this case contemptuous derision of the girl I had told her I was in love with.
Soon I began to develop ways of adjusting to her destabilizing faces—not meeting her eye, avoiding moments when the three of us would have been together, immediately starting to talk when she put on her mocking face—that made her new behavior a part of our household routine.
Angelo had not yet moved in with my mother, but he spent most evenings at her house with his children. My brother stayed locked away in his room, sorting his coins, lifting weights, and practicing his drums. He seemed to be consolidating his personal strengths and biding his time.
I had assumed that Claire and I could sleep together in my room. This was, after all, 1977, and my mother was by this point hardly unaware of the changing world around her. But she insisted that one of us sleep in my bedroom and the other in the basement, which, after many years, she and my father had succeeded in turning into another room. She was not defensively priggish like Menka, who hid his sybaritic nature behind arbitrary restrictions. It was not even that she could not bear to hear Claire and me having sex. I realized, too late, that she could not bear for us to find solace in each other in any way. I felt instinctively that Claire should stay as far away from my mother as possible, but asking her to sleep in the basement without telling her why—something I couldn’t do without alarming her—was out of the question. I moved into the basement and Claire settled into my old bedroom.
* * *
Back in Paramus I had to find work. Claire, though she came from better material circumstances than I did, was in a difficult position, too. Her father gave her just enough money for her to keep turning to him for more. Her mother’s finances were now almost entirely in control of her stepfather, who barely helped her out at all.
Taking the initiative, as she always did, Claire found a job at a women’s clothing store called Mandee in one of the malls in town. I did not have the same good fortune. None of the people I had worked for at Alexander’s or in the other stores where I had found employment were still at their old jobs. Though the country was slowly pulling out of years of deep recession—the recession that had pulled the rug out from under my father—unemployment was still high and the malls were far from lively. At Alexander’s and Bamberger’s, not only could I not find anyone I had known at the time I was at those places, but the personnel people informed me that they weren’t hiring. When I told my mother about my problems finding a job, she stared at me, pushed her cheek out with her tongue, and nodded her head, saying, Uh-huh.
Expecting divorce to expand her freedom, she had become embittered to find that, in fact, her choices and opportunities were even more limited than they had been in her marriage. In marriage, at least, she could enjoy the daily fantasy of an emergency exit. As I later learned, a rich imagination keeps as many marriages intact as it destroys. Now, however, she was living in that once fantastical future, with new material worries, Angelo’s own messy divorce, and his three kids.
A couple of weeks after we arrived, my mother convened Claire and me around the kitchen table. If I could not contribute to the household expenses, she informed me, she would not be able to afford to have both of us stay with her and Nathan. She made this declaration in a whisper, even though we were the only people there, looking only at me as she spoke, as if I was a problem that had nothing to do with Claire, and also as if Claire had no place in her house.
Claire assured her that she would happily pay for both of us out of her Mandee salary. My mother stared at her. Sweetie! she exclaimed. Honey! I will not take a single cent from you. You are a guest in my house! This of course made no sense at all. The falseness and absurdity of it drove me into the old fury.
That night, after Claire went to bed, my mother and I screamed at each other, my mother’s face red and distended in lust for combat with me, and satisfaction at my disabling rage.
* * *
Angelo came to the rescue a few days later when he arrived for dinner. He had an important business connection, he said, who could find me a job in his industry. Without even asking him what it was, I told him I’d jump at the chance.
The next night he returned, announcing that he had landed me an interview with Pied Piper, a company that owned a small fleet of ice cream trucks. There’s a future in that, he said. He chuckled, and then nodded to himself.
I spent the summer driving the Pied Piper truck around Paramus and the neighboring towns. At night I counted the money on the kitchen table with Claire. Sometimes my mother would come into the kitchen to look at my haul. Now, she said with a smile, you’re talking.
It was a good job. Being outside pleased me and I enjoyed the novelty of driving the tall, narrow truck that swayed when I took a corner too fast. I had a special fondness for the metal coin dispenser that I wore on my belt. It was a money-organizing machine that I mastered and controlled. The solidity of the dispenser, its heaviness as it hung from my belt, just above my groin, made me feel important, as embarrassed as I was to feel important on account of so little.
My rival was a Good Humor truck. It was operated by a Vietnam vet who had smuggled his sidearm home with him. Once he drove up beside me and displayed the pistol. He wanted to make a point. He would sometimes cut in front of me when a group of kids were beckoning to us from the street, causing them to jump onto the sidewalk.
During one of my circuits, the Good Humor driver pulled up alongside my truck. He raised his gun, a .45 semiautomatic, and aimed it at my head. He said: This is my block from now on. Okay? I had never had a real gun pointed at me before, but I was thrilled to recognize the situation from TV and the movies. I had the certainty of too much life ahead of me to believe that he would pull the trigger and kill me. Besides, a gun, which played such a pleasurable role in entertainment, could not possibly be lethal. I was a very young nineteen.
* * *
Though difficult books in literature and philosophy had strengthened my mind, I could not find a place in my emotions for what my mind had absorbed. My consciousness burst with ideas: The world is an imperfect shadow of reality. We are born free but live in chains. You cannot have an experience and reflect on that experience at the same time. Before you do anything, consider if it is the sort of thing everyone should do. When you meet a contradiction, make a distinction. Be a knight of faith and take a leap into the unknown. All the world’s problems are caused by the fact that people cannot sit quietly alone in their rooms. The only question worth asking is whether you should take your own life. Live dangerously! I was a cowlicked compendium of rarefied concepts. But though I saw how my mother was trying to sever the bond between Claire and me, I still thought of her as my mother. I could not imagine that she wanted to hurt me in some fundamental way.
When I had talked with my mother on the phone from Peoria, working out the arrangements for Claire and me to stay with her, I made sure to clarify one thing. I wanted to be certain that my mother would allow me to use her Chevy Impala. By now, both Claire and I had deluded ourselves into thinking that I would return to Peoria with her and so there was no reason to find ourselves a car. I could hardly afford one, anyway. My mother agreed. She had begun teaching ESL courses over the summer to supplement her income. Tha
t, she said, was pretty much the only occasion for which she needed the Impala, and she could borrow Angelo’s car in that case. If I agreed to buy groceries, I could have the Impala the rest of the time.
Almost as soon as Claire and I arrived, the Impala became a battleground.
* * *
One afternoon, I shouted upstairs to my mother that Claire and I were taking the car to go visit Paul Dolcetto. Paul and I had resumed our friendship with even more enthusiasm than before. My mother had the day off. She was lying in her bed waiting for Angelo, who was bringing his children over for dinner.
I could hear her bed creak as she slid out of it and rushed down the small staircase. We were standing at the bottom of the stairs, about to walk toward the front door.
Oh, no you’re not! said my mother, grabbing the car keys that I held in my hand.
Claire froze. She looked back and forth between my mother and me. I reacted as if out of an old reflex and pulled the keys away from my mother. I had never had a physical fight with her before. During her slapping fits, I would put up my hands to protect myself and try to back away from her until she spun out of my room. But it was as if somewhere deep inside me I had been fighting with her like this all my life.
You little shit, my mother said. Her eyes were gleaming with malice. Her entire face had been transformed. It was a swollen red mask with lips stretched into a grimace that had the appearance of a smile. Obscenities flowed from her mouth. She sounded like a movie demon speaking out of someone possessed. I had never heard her curse me before, either.
You think you can do whatever you want in my house! she cried. Do you think you can fuck your little girlfriend when I’m sleeping, eh? You think I don’t know what you do in the basement? When I’m trying to sleep? I need my sleep! As her rage rose into non sequiturs of self-pity, her screams became wailing shrieks.